Computing Before Computers

275 Pages·1990·44.196 MB·English

by  William Aspray

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COMPUTING
�B-EFORE
COMPUTERS
W.A SPRAY
A.GB.R OMLEY
M.C AMPBELL-KELLY
P.E .C ERUZZI
M.R .W ILLIAMS
Computing Before Computers
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W.A SPRAY
A.G.B ROMLYE
ContribuMt.oC rAsM PBELL-KELLY
P.E .C ERUZZI
M.R .W ILLIAMS
IOWA STATE UNIVERSPIRTEYS IS A MES
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Compubteifncogor mep uteedribsty/eW di llAisapmr ay.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-8138-0047-1
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QA76.C51893940 89-26745
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Table of Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
William Aspray
Chapter One: Early Calculation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Michael R. Williams
Chapter Two: Difference and Analytical Engines . . . 59
Allan G. Bromley
Chapter Three: Logic Machines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
William Aspray
Chapter Four: Punched-Card Machinery 122
Martin Campbell-Kelly
Chapter Five: Analog Computing Devices 156
Allan G. Bromley
vi
Chapter Six: Relay Calculators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
Paul E. Ceruzzi
Chapter Seven: Electronic Calculators 223
Paul E. Ceruzzi
Epilog 251
William Aspray
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
Contributing authors
William Aspray, author of the Introduction, Chapter 3, and the
Epilogue, is Director, IEEE Center for the History of Electrical
Engineering, 345 E. 47 St., New York, NY 10017.
Allan G. Bromley, author of Chapters 2 and 5, is Senior Lecturer,
Basser Department of Computer Science, University of Sydney,
Sydney, N.S.W., AUSTRALIA
Martin Campbell-Kelly, author of Chapter 4, is Lecturer, Computer
Science Department, University of Warwick, Coventry,
ENGLAND CV4 ?AL.
Paul E. Ceruzzi, author of Chapters 6 and 7, is Curator, Space
History, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, DC 20560.
Michael R. Williams, author of Chapter 1, is Professor, Computer
Science Department, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta,
CANADA T2N 1N4.
vii
Introduction
Wherever we turn we hear about the "Computer Revolution"
and our "Information Age." This is testimony to the public
awareness of the invention and rapid development of the computer
since the Second World War and the fundamental changes it has
driven in the way we conduct business, perform scientific research,
and spend our leisure time. With all of this attention to the computer
we tend to forget that computing has a rich history that extends back
beyond 1945. Since antiquity societies have had a need to process
information and make computations, and they have met this need
through technology.
We offer here a concise survey of computing technology prior to
the development of the modern computer. We show the continuity of
the history of computing by tracing several distinct older traditions
that over the last forty years have converged in today's technology.
Our study ends essentially in 1945, at the time when the plans for the
first electronic, stored-program computer were being made.
However, we do follow the exit of these earlier technologies, none of
which survived long after the commercialization of computers in the
1950s.
All of the contributors to this volume are historians or computer
scientists who have specialized in the study of computer history for
at least a decade. We have tried here to wear our scholarship lightly.
All efforts have been directed toward providing a balanced and
accurate account of our subject, while writing at a level accessible to
the general reader. We have attempted to relate technical innovations
to their intellectual, social, and institutional contexts: to consider not
only the machines and devices that were built and the innovations
they incorporate but also the purposes for which they were to be used,
the financial and organizational constraints and opportunities that
shaped their developments, and the impact they had on individuals
and institutions. We recognize, however, that computing has only
recently come under historical scrutiny and that our remarks,
Computing Before Computers viii
especially on the context of technological development, are of only a
preliminary nature.
This book includes seven chapters, an introduction, and an epilog.
The first chapter covers two millennia of effort to develop arithmetic
and the means to facilitate its computation. The story takes a modem
tum in the late-nineteenth century when the desk calculator, invented
200 years earlier, became economically viable for American and
European businesses. The essay traces the steady improvement in
desk calculators in the twentieth century, their incorporation into the
business world, and their diminished role after the invention of the
computer.
The second chapter, on difference and analytical engines,
examines nineteenth-century attempts to build machines to compute
mathematical tables. The prominent figure here is the British
mathematician Charles Babbage, who in the plans for his analytical
engine originated the fundamental idea of program-controlled
computing. The need for machines to calculate mathematical tables
continued in the twentieth century, and this line is traced through the
work in the 1940s of Howard Aiken and George Stibitz.
Computers are able to process symbols and control logical
operations as well as calculate numerical problems. The first serious
efforts to mechanize logical processes, in nineteenth-century Britain,
are the starting point of the next essay. It continues with the
development of logic machines in the twentieth century and, more
significantly, the increasing knowledge of the relationship between
logic and computing that forms a basis for computer science theory
today.
Punched-card sorting and tabulating equipment was first built to
process information from the 1890 United States Census. By the
1930s punched-card machinery became commonplace in
medium-sized and large businesses in Europe and the United States.
At the same time astronomers and other scientists began to adapt it
to their own uses. These business and scientific users provided the
original customer base for the electronic stored-program computer,
while their punched-card equipment was adopted as peripheral
equipment for the first electronic computing systems.
By the 1930s a rich array of calculating technology existed in the
form of desk calculators, punched-card equipment, and analog
computers (in which numerical values are measured rather than
counted). The next chapter examines a range of analog devices used
especially during the 1930s and the Second World War for scientific
Introduction ix
and engineering calculation. These include differential analyzers,
wind tunnels, network analyzers, and gunnery computers. Analog
and hybrid digital-analog computers were built until the 1960s, but
they were eventually overtaken for almost every scientific and
engineering application by the speed, precision, and programming
flexibility of digital computers.
A major reason for the success of the modem computer is its
processing speed. Until the 1930s most calculating equipment was
slow by comparison, due to the slow rate of operation of mechanical
switches. In the 1930s, in independent projects in the United States
and Germany, computing devices were developed that used
electromechanical relays for switching. These provided marked
increase in speed over mechanical calculators. The next chapter
examines the electromechanical calculators built at Harvard
University and Bell Laboratories in the United States and by Konrad
Zuse in Germany.
Even electromechanical relays were too slow to solve
cryptanalytic and ballistic table-making problems confronting the
Allied countries during the Second World War. These problems were
met by the first serious attempts to develop electronic calculating
equipment, notably the American calculator ENIAC and the British
Colossus. The seventh chapter traces the move to computing with
electricity, a critical step in the advance to the modem computer.
The convergence of these prewar calculating technologies in the
modem computer is the topic of the epilog. It shows how calculator
users and applications were already well established by the 1930s;
how various pieces of the new technology (e.g., the program-control
concept, electronic switching, and punched-card peripherals) were
already in place; and how many of the precomputer projects grew
into projects to build the first generation of computers.
Note
We appreciate the assistance given by the Charles Babbage
Institute of the University of Minnesota in the editing of this volume.
X
Further Reading
Annals of the History of Computing. Published quarterly by
Springer-Verlag, New York. A leading international journal
devoted to the history of computing.
Cortada, James W., ed. An Annotated Bibliography on the History
of Data Processing. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. A
useful guide to the available literature.
Goldstine, Herman H. The Computer From Pas cal to Von Neumann.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. A generally reliable
and readable account by one of computing's pioneers.
Metropolis, N., J. Howlett, and Gian-Carlo Rota, eds. A History of
Computing in the Twentieth Century. New York: Academic Press,
1980. A collection of essays, mainly by participants, of the first
two decades of electronic computing.
Randell, Brian, ed. The Origins of Digital Computers. New York:
Springer-Verlag, 3d ed., 1982. A collection of excerpts of
important papers on computing, with historical introductions and
a useful bibliography by the editor.
Computing Before Computers